The ability to move and maintain a network connection while operating in a wireless local area network (WLAN) is known. Wireless protocols, such as mobile internet protocol (Mobile IP) and Inter Access Point Protocol, support wireless mobile stations as they travel between WLAN access points and different subnets. Current WLAN mobility protocols assign care-of-addresses to the mobile station to forward packets to the destination host. The mobile station asks for a new IP address as it moves from one subnet to another and associates the new mobile IP address to its permanent mobile node address.
However, such support mechanisms, e.g. care-of-addresses and routing, add unacceptable latency to TCP packets as they follow a mobile station around the WLAN and are generally too slow to support many time sensitive applications, such as Voice Over IP, which require a faster subnet to subnet handoff. Additionally, many applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, instant messaging and mounted file servers, while not time sensitive, require persistent TCP connections in order to operate properly. Furthermore, security associations between the MS and an application can be maintained without additional time consuming registrations if a persistent connection is available. Standard networking solutions, such as Layer 2 tunneling, may temporarily help to solve the latency issues but add overhead to network operations, tend to focus network traffic upon a few elements of the network, etc., which is unacceptable to most networks due, for example, to reliability issues and additional operational costs.
Clearly, a need exists for a system to facilitate the effective and efficient mobility of mobile stations, particularly when time sensitive communications and the like require a persistent connection.